This is an excellent, varied and entertaining album including music from
all ten collaborations between director, Robert Zemeckis and composer, Alan
Silvestri.

It begins splendidly, in great swinging style, with the high-spirited, fast-paced
jazz-based music for Romancing the Stone with its smoky, husky
sexy saxophone solos. Next comes the exciting robust theme for Back
to the Future which is embellished and extended through a tense,
long-winding crescendo, with snare drum and timpani prominent for Back
to the Future, Part II. Bracing, exhilarating music with a western
twist, tempered by sweet and tender romantic material distinguishes
Back to the Future, Part III.

Who Framed Peter Rabbit?, is a heady mix of easy listening, raw jazz with
sleazy torch song overtones, plus western and suspense genres music for this
comic cuts adventure. For Death Becomes Her, Silvestri invents
some wonderfully comic voluptuous, catty material for Zemeckis's warring
women (Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep). The mood turns to quiet heroism and
innocent sincerity for the lovely Forrest Gump music. This
mood of child-like awe and wonder continues into Silvesti's memorable and
much-admired score for Contact, an attractive unassuming yet
reassuring drama about an alien species making its first contact with earth.

What Lies Beneath is altogether different, a creepy, dark, doom-laden tribute
to Bernard Herrmann in Psycho and Vertigo mode.

The album is completed by the latest collaboration, Cast Away.
This music is relaxing and elegiac with soothing, seashore sounds, nicely
woven into its fabric.

The only let-down is the poor standard of the booklet (a mere 4 pages) with
Robert Townson uncharacteristically breathing platitudes instead of writing
or commissioning the background/analytical notes that normally distinguish
such Varèse Sarabande compilations.